Increasingly, groups of users are using network based community forums to engage in back and forth discussions (threads) which may address almost any topic. A variety of community forums such as message boards, discussion threads, web logs (blogs), and the like are available to users over a network via applications such as browsers, instant messaging, email, chat, or the like. Using these community forums a user may make a posting which is exposed to the community or group of users, who may then respond to the original posting creating a thread. In some instances, community forums are used for support of services or products, or to otherwise get support or advice. Thus, postings in a forum may be directed at particular problems with services or products and may seek advice, answers and solutions from the community and/or the owners and support staff associated with the forum.
One technique traditionally technique for users to receive results or responses to a posted message, problem, or question required the user to make positive contact such as by continually checking back to the forum to view any answers or replies. Further, in traditional forums, other users accessing a posting may have the same or similar problems. However these users have not been able to easily indicate they are experiencing the same issue as described in a particular post. For instance, until the users made an individual posting there was no record that the user was experiencing a problem addressed in another users post. Thus, even though many users may have the same problem as described in particular posting, these users may be forced to submit another post to be tracked and/or to manually navigate back to a particular post to know when there are any related results.
Thus, it may be time consuming and inefficient for users to get results using traditional community forums. Further, it may be difficult for the owner or manager of a forum to determine which users have common problems, which problems occur most frequently, and to provide a response efficiently to a plurality of user having the same problems.